Matazoku Hokanshu

Yūzoku Hōkanshū: Kōyasan's Greatest Archive of Medieval Paper

Among the National Treasures kept on Mount Kōya, one is neither a painting nor a sculpture but a vast archive of paper. The Yūzoku Hōkanshū gathers 167 handscrolls and 9 bound volumes of medieval documents: imperial decrees, official orders, petitions, and land deeds drawn from the records that the great monastery of Kongōbu-ji had safeguarded for centuries. It is the third and largest of three related compilations that together form the core of the Kōyasan monjo, the documentary memory of one of Japan's oldest religious centers.

The papers are far older than the form they now take. During the Edo period, scholars worked through the documents held in the treasury of the Mieidō, the hall that enshrines the image of Kūkai, and chose the most significant, mounting them in sequence onto scrolls and into booklets. The result reads less like a single book than like a library of originals bound for safekeeping. One scroll carries an emperor's edict; a few scrolls along, a farmer's grievance survives in rough phonetic script.

One of three, and the deepest

The Kōyasan documents were arranged into three compilations, named in the order they were assembled. The Hōkanshū came first, in 54 scrolls; the Zoku Hōkanshū, the "continuation," followed; and the Yūzoku Hōkanshū, the "further continuation," closed the series as the most extensive of the three. Counted together, the three run to roughly 298 scrolls and 15 booklets and preserve, transcriptions included, on the order of 3,600 separate documents. The Yūzoku Hōkanshū alone accounts for close to two thousand of them.

Its reach across time is wide. Taken as a set, the three collections begin with a copied document from 992 and an original from 1115, and run down to pieces written in 1743; the documents gathered into the Yūzoku Hōkanshū itself range across the Heian through Momoyama periods. Most cluster in the Kamakura period, with a second concentration in the Nanbokuchō and Muromachi eras, so that turning through the scrolls is also a passage across six centuries.

Why it became a National Treasure

Recognition came early. The collections were first designated as national property in 1908, under the heritage laws of the Meiji era. After the present Cultural Properties Protection Law took effect, the Yūzoku Hōkanshū was raised to National Treasure status on 14 November 1953, alongside its two companion compilations.

The value lies in both breadth and authenticity. These are not later copies but, in large part, the original documents issued by the institutions and people named in them. Historians of Japan's medieval estates treat them as a primary source, and students of diplomatics, the study of how official documents were drafted and formatted, find in them a nearly complete sample of document types, from the formal edicts of the imperial court and the directives of the warrior government down to plain deeds recording the sale of a single plot of land.

Voices across the social order

What gives the archive its hold on readers is the range of voices it keeps. Successive emperors appear in their own decrees and vow-texts, beginning with Go-Shirakawa; so do the orders of the Council of State and the seal-stamped commands of later warlords. Letters survive from figures whose names anchor the medieval imagination, among them Minamoto no Yoritomo, his brother Yoshitsune, and the poet-monk Saigyō, known in religion as En'i.

The collections are equally famous for a voice from the very bottom of that order. A petition from the peasants of the Ategawa estate, lodged in 1275 against the harsh demands of their land steward, was written almost entirely in katakana, the phonetic script ordinary people could manage. Its blunt account of threats to cut off ears and slice noses has made it one of the most reproduced documents in Japanese school textbooks, a rare case in which farmers of the thirteenth century speak in something close to their own words. The Ategawa papers passed to Kōya because the estate lay under the mountain's authority.

What to look for

Because the documents were mounted long after they were written, the scrolls themselves repay attention. Their wrappings and backing papers vary from scroll to scroll, and one tradition holds that some of the finer mountings reuse fabric from Noh costumes worn when Toyotomi Hideyoshi made his pilgrimage to Kōya. The story is handed down rather than documented, yet it hints at the care lavished on the collection by those who assembled it.

Subject by subject, most of the material concerns the monastery's landholdings: the Kanshōfu estate in Kii Province and neighbors such as Arakawa, Nate, Konomakuni, Shitada, Ategawa, and Nabe, along with the Ōta estate in Bingo and the Kogi estate in Izumi. Read closely, these deeds and disputes reconstruct how a powerful religious institution managed land scattered across western Japan, which is why the collection underpins modern research on both the medieval estate system and the history of Kōya. The three compilations were published in full at the close of the Meiji period in the scholarly series Dai Nihon Komonjo.

Seeing the documents, and the mountain

The Yūzoku Hōkanshū is preserved at the Kōyasan Reihōkan, the museum that holds the religious art and archives of the mountain's temples. Paper is fragile and sensitive to light, so the scrolls are never on permanent view. Individual documents appear in rotation during special exhibitions, and selections occasionally travel to venues such as the Tokyo National Museum and the Wakayama Prefectural Museum. Checking the Reihōkan's current exhibition before a visit is the surest way to know what will be on display.

Even when the scrolls are resting, the setting rewards the journey. Mount Kōya is a monastic town founded by Kūkai in the early ninth century, ringed by peaks and dense with temples, many of which take in overnight guests and open their morning rituals to visitors. The Danjō Garan temple complex and the long cedar avenue of the Okunoin cemetery lie within walking distance of the Reihōkan, so a day built around the museum widens easily into a fuller encounter with the place these documents describe.